Top Ten Hits Of The End Of The World

It’s 2012, and Prince Rama has made the Top Ten Hits of the End of the World. Conceived as a pseudo-compilation album, the Brooklyn duo invented ten different pop bands that died during the apocalypse, channelling the ghosts of each one to perform the various songs. Spanning genres and stylistic eras from across the globe, Top Ten Hits explores pop music’s relationship to memory, nostalgia, and the spirit world. Incorporating influences as disparate as cosmic disco, motorcycle rock, new-wave, grunge, tribal goth, Arabic pop, and ghost-modern glam, Prince Rama filters each sound through the destroyed lens of a post-apocalyptic future looking back at the wonders of its sonic past. Recorded half with Tim Koh in Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s studio and mixed with Scott Colburn (Animal Collective, Sun City Girls, Arcade Fire), Top Ten Hits of the End of the World isn’t just a pop album, it’s a retrospective requiem of all pop albums ever made. Nothing like this has ever been attempted by a single band, and its residual echoes will continue to haunt this world and the next.

“What the hell is that?” is a question very familiar to Brooklyn band Prince Rama, and although they’re used to hearing it by now, the sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson could probably not offer much in the way of a simple answer. They’ve lived at ashrams, worked for utopian architects, delivered lectures from pools of fake blood, and have conducted group exorcisms scored by old VHS workouts. Their often unpredictable live shows incorporate elements of psychedelic ceremony, performance art, and initiation rite, and when Animal Collective’s Avey Tare discovered them in a Texas dive bar in 2010, they were equipping the audience with handmade shoes clad with broken chimes. They signed to Paw Tracks shortly thereafter, and have since released two albums, Shadow Temple and Trust Now, which peaked respectively at #3 and #6, on the Billboard New Age Charts. Now, after two full-lengths on Paw Tracks, touring in four of the seven continents and recording with members of Animal Collective and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Prince Rama have finished inventing an apocalypse on which to base their pseudo-compilation album, Top Ten Hits of the End of the World, which comprises songs “channelled” from fictional pop bands who fell victim to their created catastrophe. Last year Taraka wrote a manifesto on the Now Age that puts forth Prince Rama’s aesthetic and spiritual philosophies, and though it’s received equal praise and criticism from the worlds of art and music, the sisters, not ones for artistic compromise, continue to promulgate its terms.